Oculus Rift “Crystal Cove” prototype brings new features

The team working on the much talked about Oculus Rift have been working hard at improving the VR experience and the latest prototype has just been shown at CES for the first time.

Codenamed Crystal Cove, this new prototype version has the new improved display of 1080p, improved latency which may reduce motion sickness, a new low persistence AMOLED screen to stop the nasty motion blur seen on the original LED screen, and there’s now also now positional tracking.

Now with an external camera which tracks points on the face cover, the RIFT can monitor the top part of your body and not just the head movement which will improve the feeling of immersion. It will make the VR experience feel more natural and should go some way to reducing motion sickness.

“This is just a feature prototype. It’s not at all representative of the final consumer look and feel. Once we feel like something is good enough and we’re confident we’ll be able to ship it with the consumer product, we feel good about announcing it. We still may change how it’s done, but we feel great about the positional tracking system. It’s been a year in the works, we’ve tried multiple different approaches, and this delivered the experience we were looking for.”

Oculus appear to be making some great progress with the Rift’s development, and although a consumer version is still some way off and development feels slow, each new version demonstrated is a great improvement. By the time the consumer version is ready the Rift should be a solid product with all the finest components available having been tried and tested.